What is the difference between a general reference and a specialized reference? When should you organized by topic, person, company etc rather than an A-Z alphabetical filing order?

Hey, Curtis,

It depends on your individual needs. Do you work at an office? Maybe keeping separate A-Z systems is a good idea, then, with one at the office and a second at home.

I have one A-Z reference system in a large filing cabinet (I work out of my home). I store our accounting in the same cabinet, but in its own section by year and month. I have all of my manuals filed in a separate box next to the cabinet sorted by type (e.g. large kitchen appliances, hand tools, software etc). So everything for me is in one location, but I do have separations based on content.

I'm also scanning a LOT of my files into Evernote so I can dump the paper and free up some space. So it's really up to you. What makes the best sense for all of your stuff?

Dena

Comment

Files which need to be shared and stored accordingly get their own space; for instance, in my previous position, I was a Student Services secretary. There were 2,000 student academic files in my possession, but they weren't "my" files, obviously, and lived in a centralized filing system rather than in my drawers.

When it comes to your own files, David suggests you should break things out into a separate drawer when you get to half a file drawer's worth of files on that one topic, which I've found to be a good rule of thumb. Right now, I'm lucky enough that my general reference system all fits in two file drawers. I have one drawer that is A-Z with just general stuff, and one drawer that is only for classes, conferences, and papers for my Ph.D. program.

If there are only a handful of files in any given category, you can just put the category on the label and file them A-Z. For instance, I'm learning a new hobby of photography, and so I have a few files like "Camera—Rebel," "Camera—Powershot," "Camera—Outdoor Photography" etc. It keeps them bunched together in the drawer, but there aren't so many that they can't just all get filed under "c"